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The Oldest Trade

I never noticed before. I never noticed, but suddenly I see that the world is full of prostitutes. Or is it that I’m becoming obsessed? Only a month ago the world seemed a very nuptial place – everywhere I looked I saw brides and weddings and everything pointed to love and romance. De Beers’ adverts on buses. The local church festooned with flowers. Honeymoon special in the ‘Escape’ section of the Observer. Now my world is rife with the world’s oldest trade. I’ve just been to my local newsagent’s. I never before stopped to read those hand-written cards in the window. I couldn’t believe it – an alarming number of them offer ‘exotic massage’ or ‘adult fun’ or ‘toys and role play’. One advertised ‘dominatrix. Nice flat.’ What does Mr Patel think he’s doing, condoning all of this? And the newspaper I’ve just bought has three different scandals involving hookers – a politician caught kerb crawling, a police raid on a vice ring in suburbia and a respected actor caught with an escort and Class A drugs in a Leeds hotel. If I’d bought a tabloid, I bet there’d be even more stories.

Have you ever noticed how every local high street has a dodgy massage/sauna establishment? But have you ever seen anyone actually go in or come out? You should see the phone box near work, it’s awash with cards advertising the services of Asian Nymph, Busty Blonde, Thai Princess, Fantasia Twins and scores of other unlikely-named sex workers. Who uses phone boxes nowadays anyway? Doesn’t everyone have a mobile? Are they there only as a pinboard for pimps? I noticed that two of the cards have the same photo but with different names and phone numbers. As if, in the end, all the punter requires is a nice, accommodating vagina: surface details are interchangeable or irrelevant. Perhaps it simply doesn’t matter what she looks like.

Are they prettier than me?

Are they better in bed than I am?

How much does it cost?

How much does Saul pay?

How much money has he spent, over the years?

I hate him I hate him but how then can I miss him? I haven’t seen him for a week. I’m running out of excuses. I’ve done the imagined flu. Now I’m fobbing him off with make-believe Pilates classes and non-existent arrangements with Alice. I know I can’t keep kidding myself that I’ll think about it all later, that somehow I’ll know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I cannot believe this has happened. Maybe it didn’t. Perhaps I was mistaken. There’s probably a straightforward explanation. There has to be. Saul Mundy does not use prostitutes. It really is the most loathsome and ridiculous notion.

‘Alice? Can you meet me for lunch? There’s something we need to do.’

‘Of course I can.’

It is one of the most bizarre marks of their friendship but also the truest stamp of their intimacy and loyalty that neither Alice nor Thea has thought to acknowledge that they’re on speaking terms again. In fact, they’ve slipped right back into being the closest of friends. There have been no outright apologies, no calm or emotional workshopping of their massive falling-out. Thea is in the midst of a crisis – why wouldn’t she turn to Alice for help? And why wouldn’t Alice drop everything to be there? Apologize? Who should apologize to whom? Didn’t you know that love means never having to say you’re sorry?

Thea and Alice retraced her steps of a week ago, or were they Saul’s steps, back down Berwick Street. They turned left and stopped outside Black Beauty’s stable. There was the doorway, wide open; the shabby staircase leading up.

‘Do you want me to go up?’ Alice asked.

Thea looked at her as if she was crazy. ‘And do what?’

‘I don’t know,’ Alice shrugged. ‘Suss it out? Talk to them? Ask them if they know Saul?’

‘No!’ Thea cried. ‘No! I don’t even know why I need to be here.’

They crossed the street and loitered. The perspex shop was once again closed for an hour. ‘Need any perspex?’ Alice asked Thea, while they lingered, as if she was talking about toothpaste or postage stamps. Thea laughed nervously though a frown was stitched to her face. They watched and waited. No one went in or came out of the building.

‘Do they have days off, do you think?’ Alice pondered.

‘What are we doing here?’ Thea asked Alice.

‘I don’t know,’ Alice admitted. ‘If we loiter much longer, they might think we want a job.’

Thea tittered bravely but then a man went in and wiped her smile away.

‘Christ,’ Alice hissed, ‘he could have been our fathers – did you see him? All suited and dapper and – normal?’

‘I think I want to go now,’ Thea pleaded, walking a few yards this way and then that, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ She started walking away. ‘I don’t want to wait for him to reappear. I don’t want to time him. I don’t want to stand here while he’s paying – and having – sex right now, yards from where we are.’

Alice linked arms with her and they walked briskly away. She sat Thea down in a café and allowed her as much silence and middle-distance gazing as she needed. Finally, Thea looked up and mouthed, ‘I don’t know what to do, Alice. I don’t know what to do about anything. What do I do with all my plans?’

‘Do you love him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it enough?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Had you any other doubts, any at all, before you uncovered all this?’

‘None whatsoever.’

Alice shook her head and shrugged. ‘I know, without asking him or you, that this man loves you absolutely.’

‘But he goes to prostitutes!’ Thea protested, suddenly objecting to Saul having anything in his defence at all.

‘We don’t know that,’ Alice said, hoping she sounded more convinced than she felt, ‘not for sure.’

‘I saw him go in! I saw him come out!’ Thea declared. ‘I don’t think Black Beauty runs the Anna Sewell fan club. I don’t think “Models! top” sell Plasticine or Hornby toy railways.’ Thea was hunched, rocking with the pain of it all. ‘I want to run away.’

Alice felt powerless as she tried to comfort her. ‘If you run from pain, it will follow you – but if you turn towards it, face it head on, it can only reach halfway,’ Alice soothed.

‘But that’s like saying a problem shared is a problem solved and it’s not, Alice, it’s not,’ Thea sobbed tearlessly. ‘I’ve shared with you that Saul pays for sex, fucks hookers, visits prostitutes, call it what you will and what have I solved? My anguish isn’t lessening, it’s increasing.’

Alice sucked at her bottom lip thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t have sex with them, Thea. Maybe he has a perversion he’s embarrassed about – maybe he likes to dress as a baby or a nun, perhaps he likes to look but not touch. Maybe he likes to be spanked or spat at or pissed on or God knows what.’

‘He has me!’ Thea bellowed. ‘Let him spank me, if that’s what he wants. I’ll wee on him, if that turns him on. If he satisfies my every desire, why can’t I satisfy his?’

Alice paused again. ‘I’ll do the devil’s advocate thing, OK?’ She waited for Thea’s reluctant shrug before continuing. ‘We don’t know the specifics but what we do know is that it’s Saul’s secret. Don’t we? Isn’t it? A secret he’d categorically hate you to discover. You chanced upon his most private whim, however deviant we decree it. You weren’t meant to know. He’d be mortified.’

‘No!’ Thea all but barked. ‘No Alice no. Christ, sometimes I pick my nose and eat it, sometimes I waft the duvet and indulge in the stench of my farts, sometimes I fantasize about gang-bangs – those are the secrets of mine that I’d hate Saul to discover. Come on. No! No correlation.’

‘At our age, we all have history,’ Alice tried a different tack.

‘This isn’t history!’ Thea objected. ‘A week ago is not history!’

‘The thing I’m sure about,’ said Alice, trying to sound balanced and credible, ‘is that he’s not doing this to hurt you. OK? Can you hear that? Saul wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. You are the love of his life and I think that you do know that. Whatever he’s doing, whatever he pays for, it is a weird, upsetting, dark predilection – but on paper he’s a wonderful boyfriend. You’ve never doubted him, you’ve never loved or been loved so deeply, so entirely. So, can you live with it?’

‘Turn a blind eye?’ Thea was staggered. ‘Ignore the fact that the man I honour with my sexual fidelity fucks whores in his lunch hour?’ Alice looked down at the table. ‘What would you do, Alice,’ Thea asked her levelly, just then thinking that Saul wasn’t so much dark as the devil incarnate, ‘if this was you? If you found out that Mark pays for sex?’

They looked at each other and tears sprang to both sets of eyes. They both knew that Mark simply wouldn’t.

‘I hate him, I hate him, I hate him,’ Thea sobbed.

‘The thing is,’ Alice said carefully, ‘I think you really want to hate him but I don’t think you ever can.’

‘I never want to see him again.’

‘The thing is,’ said Alice, ‘at some point you’re simply going to have to.’